A Look Toward the Future

It takes learning ability and personal flexibility to evolve and change organizations.  New forms of governance and leadership will have to be learned.  As the rate of change itself increases, learning ability will consist of perpetual learning and change will be the only constant.

Drucker suggests that the leader of the future will look like this --

• extraordinary levels of perception and insight into the realities of the world and into themselves
• extraordinary levels of motivation to enable them to go through the inevitable pain of learning and change, especially in a world with looser boundaries, in which loyalties become more difficult to define
• the emotional strength to manage their own and others' anxiety as learning and change become more and more a way of life
• new sills in analyzing cultural assumptions, identifying functional and dysfunctional assumptions, and evolving processes that enlarge the culture by building on its strengths and functional elements
• willingness and ability to share power and control according to people's knowledge and skills, that is, to permit and encourage leadership to flourish throughout the organization

Perhaps the most salient aspect of future leadership will be that these characteristics will not be present in a few people all the time but will be present in many people some of the time, as circumstances change and as different people develop the insight to move into leadership roles.

Appointed leaders will not play the key leadership roles but will be perpetual diagnosticians who will be able to empower different people at different times and to let emergent leadership flourish.

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